


Your Rules and Wisdom Choke You

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Spoilers, don't blame me blame hamartia, don't feel sorry for Hux he's an evil space Nazi, this is the starkiller base of fics, this thing is sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:09:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5734231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over. The First Order has disintegrated. The former General Hux is being tried for war crimes.</p><div class="center">
  <p>---</p>
</div>Content warning for discussions of atrocities and war crimes, executions.
            </blockquote>





	Your Rules and Wisdom Choke You

**Author's Note:**

> Please be forewarned, if you do not do well with depressing, angsty fic, this is not the one for you; because this is the angstiest thing I have written. 
> 
> Title drawn from Radiohead’s _Exit Music (for a film)_. I am assuming that Rey is Luke’s daughter for the purposes of this fic. 
> 
> This thing is so sad it might destroy some of the love remaining in this universe today, leading to increases in the rates of divorce and depression. Please consume in moderation. Drive safely. 
> 
> Thank you to SamichMachine who inspired this. Soggy rotting produce intended for this fic’s depressing nature should be directed at me, not them, because they told me it needed a happy ending but I didn’t because I didn’t feel like it was right for someone to escape their sentence in a fic that so closely referenced the Nuremberg Trials.

Hux dealt out a game of solitaire on the scratched desk before him, caught an upside-down glimpse of the name tag stitched onto his prison uniform. It still felt strange to see that name in full – Brendol (for his father), Hux, no indication of rank. No, he thought to himself, prisoners of war didn’t have rank, just a name and serial number. He was not a general any more now that the First Order was gone. The loss was almost a physical thing, and he probed his own feelings cautiously, tentatively, as though tonguing at a raw spot of gum where a tooth had once been. 

He was familiar with physical loss too – his captors had treated him decently for the most part, but in the first hours of his capture there had been some lapses. One of those lapses had cost him an eyetooth and a split lip. The lip had healed after a few days, but the tooth was gone forever. 

So went the days he had given to his state in love and loyalty – his youth, his childhood, hours of training and service – all ashes in vacuum. Which Hux knew he would eventually become, once this farce of a trial concluded. They were going to execute him, he knew, incinerate his body, launch his remains into space so that nobody could mourn him. Not that his parents would or could, he thought. His father had died, he had learned in prison, of a massive stroke that had followed the news of Hux’s capture and the announcement that he, along with other senior members of First Order command, would go on trial for war crimes. His mother had gone into hiding, terrified of future reprisals. He did not blame her – he would have told her to do so himself. He considered himself relatively lucky. Others had lost much more. 

The few people Hux loved did not need to be dragged down by his failure, he thought as he picked the makeshift sabacc cards back up and shuffled them carefully in his hands, laid them out again. The deck had been made from note-card and featured hand-drawn doodles for the faces and suits, blank backs. He had made the deck himself with stationery that his jailers had allowed him, supplies that he had requested along with slates full of Imperial legal texts when he dismissed his appointed legal counsel and decided to defend himself in trial. 

That had been before the first day of the trial, before he had realized that this entire thing was a mummery, an exercise in rationalizing his death to appease a fearful and angry public. It was no surprise that billions of people wanted him dead; it had been part of his life since he had become old enough to realize that the First Order wasn’t just a flag of allegiance or a fleet or a government, but an entire way of living that was at odds with the corruption and disorder elsewhere in the galaxy. It had amused Hux painfully to watch the New Republic abandon its avowed justice and compassion in order to make an example out of him. 

So he sat at the tiny desk in his prison cell and laid out the cards, turning the randomness of the deck into a tiny display of order. It soothed him, calmed him, gave him something to do besides pace or lie in his bunk and think or pointlessly read dense legalese in preparations that would not matter anyway. And he thought while he arranged the cards in five neat rows onto the scratched desk top, thought about the past that had led him to this present, and the narrowing walls of his tomorrows.

\---

Ben Solo sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of his darkened room, unable to sleep. A comms console, a bed, a footlocker for his few belongings, a holder for slates and books, and a tiny escritoire were the only furnishings within. That had been all he had really needed for most of his life as Kylo Ren, and it was still what he had really needed now that he had shed that name and owned his old life again.

He smiled bleakly at the thought, sighed and then abandoned his efforts to meditate. As though lives were like books, things you marked and put aside and then picked back up for resumption on some later date. That was not how things had actually worked out, and the tracker bracelet on his left wrist was a constant reminder of the gaps between his past and his present. 

Instead he stood up, padded barefoot to the antique wood-framed bed and lay down on top of the covers, staring up at nothing in particular. The battered surplus footlocker at the end of his bed stood in dumb contrast to the room’s restrained opulence and the understated luxury of its furniture and fittings. This was Varykino, a lake retreat owned by his maternal grandmother’s family; the place had remained vacant, its sumptuous furnishings draped with dustcovers after the end of the Empire. House Naberrie had not used the residence since Padmé Naberrie Amidala’s funeral, lending it only to the Royal House of Naboo. Emperor Palpatine had declined its use when in power, preferring his own retreat west of Moenia. 

Ben’s mother, Leia, had arranged for his uncle Luke to use this estate after the announcements that the trials would take place on Naboo. It was private, peaceful, and reachable only by crossing the lake, which meant that it was the perfect place for an old Jedi and his students to train and meditate. The estate’s isolation also made it an ideal location for Ben to live out the years of his house arrest – a sentence pronounced by the war crimes tribunal after his own trial, the first of several planned. 

The reasons for trying him first had been cynical enough – to underscore the First Order’s prized Jedi Killer returning as a penitent, make a public show of the tribunal’s mercy before the executions started in earnest and distract from the real and pertinent complaints that the Resistance had been left undermanned and underfunded despite his mother’s reports of the First Order’s rearmament decades ago. Some people had talked about his heroic redemption, of his turn back to the Light like he had come out of some kind of myth. Ben did not feel redeemed or heroic, only terribly conscious that he had gotten off lightly in his trial because of his family connections, because of his abilities with the Force. 

“As the defendant Ben Solo’s actions have been testified to as having been caused by Force manipulation of his thoughts and behavior, and thus cannot be attributed solely to his free will, and also in light of the attempts the defendant has made to atone for his crimes with service to the Resistance, the Court hereby remands him to the custody of the Jedi Luke Skywalker until the day a Jedi Council is formed, proper, at which point he will be tried by his own equals in the Force.”

Ben remembered the glaring lights overhead, his cousin Rey standing guard beside him in the grand courtroom, cool hard point of calm that he had wanted to cling to in the sick-making fear and anxiety of the wait as the judges had deliberated. She had taken one of his shackled hands in her own as the verdict had been read, her actions prompted only by the Force, and he had held gratefully on to her small, strong fingers and bowed his head away from the stares he could feel scorching his skin, a myriad tiny angers concentrated like heat and light through so many magnifying glasses. 

Rey was strong, and that was truth, resilience of a desert plant feeding on scant dew and infrequent rain until it grew strong enough to flourish and bloom, and feeling her vitality, Ben thought of another strength, of discipline like cold metal wrapped around a bitter, medicinal hatred, the salt and iron of ambition. _Hux,_ he thought, knowing that his own trial was only the first, that surviving members of First Order command would also be tried for war crimes, crimes against sapients. As the former officer in charge of Starkiller Base and the orchestrator of the Hosnian Prime Atrocity, Hux would be the galaxy’s most hated man.

Rey looked at Ben then, a long, searching look that he had grown to expect and recognize. She squeezed his fingers again, reassuringly, and then looked away without speaking. He felt her close herself off in the Force, allowing him to grieve in the privacy of his own thoughts. Ben had never discussed his feelings for Hux with her, but he knew that she knew, and that she was simply too polite and discreet to discuss it publicly. That gesture weighed heavily upon him; a kindness that he had slowly been learning to accept. 

Ben had spent the past six weeks on Varykino and did not know how Hux’s trial was going – his access to the Holonet was restricted according to the terms of his house arrest, and in any case he was fairly sure that neither his mother nor his uncle Luke would take well to any attempts to evade those restrictions. So instead he meditated and exercised under Luke’s supervision, chopped wood for the basic stove Luke preferred to use, helped with the laundry and other chores. Ben had also managed to completely get in Rey’s way when she had prepared supper the first night he had spent at Varykino, and had subsequently promised never to try to help her cook again. (He had no idea why she had been so upset. It wasn’t as though her cooking was any better than his or Luke’s.)

Ben knew the point of all this labor – Luke and Rey were trying to keep him busy enough that he wouldn’t have too much time to think of his many crimes until he had recovered enough to process all those events. It worked for the most part, but even then he would lie awake in the small hours of the night and stare up into the darkness above his head. He would reach out into the nothing around him and try to find Theed, try to find Hux in the old Imperial Security headquarters next to the sprawling courthouse in the Plaza of Justice. Political dissidents had once gone in there in Darth Vader’s day, coming out changed into mere shadows of themselves, or not emerging at all. 

The building had lain unused after the fall of Palpatine, and a debate had gone up about its conversion to a museum or a memorial, and then the war with the First Order had happened. Now the former headquarters had been pressed back into service as a prison for the most notorious individuals in the galaxy, all heirs to and descendants of the former Empire’s twisted ideals. Ben had spent a short time incarcerated there himself, before and during his own trial. The cells had been cold, lonely places, each one a self-contained unit behind armored transparisteel interview windows, haunted by the tears and screams of dissidents detained and tortured decades ago. 

Ben remembered the first time he had managed to make contact with Hux, found him lying asleep in the bunk in his sterile cell. Ben had watched the slow rise and fall of his chest under his prison uniform, studied the new shadows under his eyes, faint new lines of worry and care creasing his brow. A hot sharp shame had lurched through Ben’s soul, ache and shame thudding heavily through his veins as he thought of how lightly he had gotten off. As Kylo Ren Ben had killed many people, his own father among them. He had slain them with premeditation and with passion, with weapons and with the Force. His own crimes were surely as terrible as Hux’s, and the scalding awful knowledge that he would live, would wake up in this lush estate tomorrow and the days after while Hux awaited trial and the possibility of a death sentence tore at him and left him sobbing, crying loudly enough that Luke had roused himself and come to Ben’s room to find out what had happened. 

Lying in his bed, Ben closed his eyes and reached out again Theed-ward, anchored his thoughts in the Plaza of Justice before moving past the burnt-sugar haze of shielding, the routine, weary thoughts of the guards, seeking a point in space that he knew well. Hux felt different to Ben’s un-senses, had felt different since his defeat and capture by the Republic’s forces. The delicate control was still there, discipline and restraint, but the anger had given way to a bleak, resigned despair, and the bitter hate had transmuted somewhat to an equally bitter amusement. 

_Hux,_ Ben thought, felt his target lying in his narrow bunk in his cell. _It’s me._ He pushed harder against the boundaries of his own self and mind, managed to wrap his mental fingers against Hux’s hand where it lay on top of the thin blanket in his bunk. 

He felt Hux’s hand twitch in his own, strong fingers closing over his extended sense of touch and proprioception. That was the only reply Hux could give, not being gifted with the Force. 

_I miss you,_ Ben thought at him; _I’m worried about you._ And then Hux lifted his own hand to his lips, brushed his mouth hot and wet against his knuckles in a faraway, indirect kiss before Ben’s own strength gave out and he returned, falling, hurtling into the too-tight cage of his ribs squeezing against the ache in his heart. 

This was not the first time Ben Solo had cried himself to sleep alone in his bed, and it would not be the last.

\---

Hux sat in the defendant’s box on the second day of his trial, no longer a general, just a man like any other, closed in on all sides by armored transparisteel, like some exotic pet in a vivarium. Say what he would about the New Republic, at least they took security seriously. The death threats had been constant, unending. He had stopped paying attention to them, at least, the ones that had passed screening to actually arrive in his mail, but his jailers had taken each one seriously. He had walked into the courtroom surrounded by guards, and he would leave the courtroom also hemmed in by them.

The trial had adjourned yesterday after the chief justice’s opening speech, a well-crafted four hours of what Hux had thought of as a swollen piece of bombast and hot air. The speech had covered the First Order’s sins, its supposed terrorism and war crimes, its war of aggression. Hux had not objected to any of that. He had been a soldier serving his state against opponents that had declared a mock peace and then continued to fund guerilla war against his people. Yes, he had planned and orchestrated the building of Starkiller Base, and ordered its firing against the Hosnian system. But it was a truism that the victors wrote the histories, and a less-discussed corollary that the victors also decided the verdicts. 

“May it please your Honors,” the chief prosecutor said as this session of the trial opened, “The defendant, Brendol Hux, has been charged with war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against sapients. The evidence, which abounds, will show his systematic approach towards the dehumanization of thousands of individuals in the Stormtrooper training program. Further evidence and testimony demonstrates his calculated ruthlessness in warfare and his willingness to murder billions of sapient beings under orders in the Hosnian Prime Atrocity. This evidence I present will prove to you his incontrovertible guilt in those serious matters.” 

“And how does the defendant plead?” one of the four judges asked.

Hux’s tribunal-appointed defender, Riel Henb, started to rise from her chair, but he shook his head at her, and she sat back down. She pushed the tinted goggles covering her eyes up her brow and put her face in her hands, spoke. “For the record,” she said wearily, her voice slightly muffled, “I want to state that I have told my client that he is being an obstinate idiot in wishing to represent himself before this court.” 

A dry chuckle sounded from the public gallery behind Hux. “So noted,” the judge continued, “Defendant?”

Hux rose to his full height in the defendant’s box, stared through the centimeters-thick transparisteel to rake his gaze across the prosecution before he looked back at his own handwritten notes. “Your Honors. Article 19 of your charter states that the tribunal will not be bound by technical rules of evidence. Article 21 states that the tribunal shall not require proof of common knowledge. According to the wording of your own legal charter, _anything_ can be common knowledge, thus removing your obligation to present proof of any of the allegations you have just made. With all due respect, Justices, your Honors,” Hux said with exaggerated politeness, respect most definitely _not_ intended, “I do not plead because this tribunal is a farce. This tribunal takes due process, bends it over a table and does unprintable things to it. It would likely save more taxpayer credits if you just ordered a detail of men to take me out behind the courthouse and have me shot.”

There was a heartbeat of silence, and then the whispers in the courtroom built, hissed, grew into a chaotic roar. 

“Murderer!” someone shouted. “Killer!” Hux found a still point in the surging crowd, saw his old adversary General Leia Organa sitting in the public gallery. Her gaze was cool and steady, weighted with sorrow even through the armored transparisteel defendant’s box he was sitting in. She had not come to gloat, Hux thought, but he could not fathom any other reason for her presence. She had also been outspoken with her displeasure on the legal irregularities surrounding this military tribunal – something that would most definitely cost her support in the political arena. He tipped a salute in her direction, a gesture at his last worthy opponent, and she nodded, smiled simply and sadly at him. 

And then the gavel was striking hard and loud, cutting through the uproar with a series of cracks. “Order! Order in the court!” 

They recorded his refusal to plead as a “Not guilty.”

\---

Ben had been wading along the pebbly shore, checking the fish traps that Luke had set out and collecting the catch, when he saw the small gondola speeder coming across the lake to Varykino, its wake a white frothy line across the deep blue of the lake’s chill waters. He stood knee-deep in the water and watched the speeder approach, curious about its occupants. And then he remembered who he was, thought again of the shame lapping seasick at the back of his throat and turned back to his chores. It wasn’t as though anyone would be coming to see him, and it felt like a better idea to just stay out of the way.

Ben grasped each fish in gloved hands and clubbed it across the head for mercy, then put each shivering silvery body in a woven-grass creel. He cleaned and gutted each fish with a knife at a small weathered wooden table on the shore, then re-baited the traps with the heads. The guts went into a small metal pail that he brought back to the lodge with the fish. Ben tossed the pail’s contents out into the nuna pen, and the small, rotund flightless birds squawked and bickered among themselves for the best bits in the fish guts. 

“Your mother’s here to see you,” Rey told him as he rinsed the pail out and left it upside-down on the back step; she had been tending trays of seedling plants not yet large enough to transplant into the rich patch of soil beside the nuna pen, a space she had marked out with sticks and string to form the tidy little rows of a kitchen garden. 

“Is she waiting for me?” Ben asked. He was fairly sure that he had not spent that much time at the shore, that the speeder had not docked at the lodge’s small slip yet. 

“No,” Rey said, wiping her forehead with the back of a grimy hand, “but you won’t have time to clean up and change into something dry if you don’t hurry up and put those fish in the pantry.”

Ben had just finished changing into fresh clothes when he heard a polite tap on his room door. Mom, he thought, and he opened the door to let her in. Instead he saw a small Sullustan woman in a formal brown jacket and trousers, sensible low-heeled boots. Her great dark eyes gazed out at him from behind lightly tinted goggles that lent her an oddly studious look. His mother stood behind her, her expression worried underneath the semblance of a faint smile. 

“Ben,” his mother said, “This is Riel Henb.” She gestured briefly to the smaller woman standing before her. 

“A pleasure to meet you,” Henb said. She extended a hand to him, and he clasped it briefly as she continued, “I am Brendol Hux’s appointed legal defender.”

“Uh, come in,” Ben said, stepping aside from the doorway, and then he realized the relative lack of furniture in his room. “Maybe somewhere else would be better – I don’t exactly have anywhere for everyone to sit.” 

“I’ll sit on your bed, Ben,” his mother said, and he sat down next to her while Henb took the chair by his escritoire. His mother took his hand briefly as he settled down, her fingers cool and dry, but he sensed tremors of anxiety and nervousness thrumming through her, through the Force. 

“I am here on behalf of my client,” Henb continued once she had seated herself, and time seemed to stretch, slow, dust motes in sunlight hanging forever in the air.

“Hux,” Ben whispered, and then cleared his throat, “I haven’t seen him in a long time, not since –” He stopped, then, swallowed. 

“He is doing as well as can be expected,” Henb said, her expression vaguely rueful, “Which is to say, not so well. I apologize, but I cannot tell you more.”

“No, I understand,” Ben said. “Client/attorney privilege.” He thought that he had done a good job of sounding calm, but he could feel his mother’s hand on his back, her touch gentle and light. He could not remember the last time she had tried to soothe him this way, and it only added to the anxiety he felt. 

“I’m here for two reasons,” Henb said. She opened the nerf-skin attaché case she had put on the escritoire, drew out a slate. “Firstly, my client wants to declare you the sole beneficiary of his will in the event of his death. Secondly, he wants to see you.”

“I will,” Ben said, swallowed hard against a sudden lump in his throat as he glanced at his mother. “Wait. Can I even see him under the conditions of my arrest?” he asked.

“That is –“ Henb adjusted the seat of her goggles, rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “According to the terms of your sentence, as far as I can see, you’re permitted to leave this estate temporarily provided you have a Jedi escort to make sure you don’t violate the terms of your arrest. Allowances are generally made for things such as medical appointments. Hux had me look into it on his behalf.” 

“That doesn’t cover ‘walking into the highest security prison in the galaxy without incident’, does it?” he asked, and Henb exchanged a look with his mother, one that he recognized as the _‘you see what I mean’_ look.

“In most cases it would not, but there is also the matter of this letter that my client wishes delivered to you,” Henb reached into her attaché case and pulled out a small, sealed envelope, the handwriting on its exterior smooth and neat. _To Ben Solo,_ it read. 

Ben knew that handwriting, knew that Hux had addressed this letter himself. Had it stung him to use Ben’s real name, his old name? Slowly he took it from Henb’s hand, glanced sidelong at his mother, who politely averted her gaze. He sensed her fear and curiosity, but also a hint of embarrassment, and he tore the flap open, sliding his finger between it and the body of the envelope proper. 

In the envelope was a letter, on the letter two short paragraphs, the Aurebesh growing scratchier and less controlled as Ben read on.

 _Kylo,_ it read, _Ben. Whichever name you would prefer me to use. I have no understanding of the Force, no knowledge of its mysticism, so this is the only way I can respond to you. Some nights I feel you beside me, as though you were here. I trust that is your doing, but I also fear that I might be driven insane by the idiot witterings of the prosecution and its witnesses._

_I confess that the trial is not going well. There is no way it could ever have gone well for me. My time is short. So I ask you, with the humblest sincerity: will you do me the very great honor of being my widower? I will await your answer to the very last second of my life._

And then there was Hux’s signature, more illegible than Ben had ever seen it before. The paper reeked of fear, fear and pain and despair and a last desperate hope to Ben’s un-senses, and he felt tears stinging his eyes, in his nose as his hand started to shake. The letter rustled softly in his grip, and he felt his mother’s arms reach gently around him in a reassuring hug. 

“You knew?” Ben asked his mother. So many questions in those two words. _Did you know about Hux? Did you know I loved a boy? Did you know who I gave up to come back to you?_ He wiped the tears off his face with the back of his left hand, stilled his right with an effort of will. 

“I always have,” she said, the slight tremor in her voice holding the answers to all his unasked questions. She squeezed him again, warm and reassuring. “You’re my son. How could I not know?” 

“Are you okay with this, Mom?” he asked, looking into his mother’s eyes, searching her face for – oh, he didn’t know what. Anger, perhaps. Dismay. Disapproval, perhaps. But he could see only sadness, sadness and love radiating from her, and somehow that hurt more, a delicate, twisting ache centered somewhere underneath his heart. 

“I don’t want to see you hurt, Ben,” Leia whispered at length, her own eyes bright with tears, fear, hope. “But I know that if I forbade this, I would be hurting you even more.” 

“As it happens,” Henb said after a discreet silence, “Allowances are also made, both in the stipulations of your house arrest and in current New Republic penal code, for the ceremony of marriage.” 

Ben looked up at her, tried to smile and felt the tears starting again. “When do we do this?” he asked her. 

“As soon as possible,” Henb said, “The trial is moving so quickly that we won’t have much time.” 

“Tell me more,” he said, and she did.

\---

Rey came to Ben’s room a half-hour after his mother and Riel Henb had departed the estate, the both of them leaving to set the marriage in motion and facilitate the no-doubt sensitive matter of a convicted traitor under house arrest marrying a war criminal currently under trial for crimes against sapients.

She found him rummaging through the footlocker by his bed and simply sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, waited for him to pause and look up at her, which he did. 

“Aunt Leia told me you’d need me to escort you somewhere. She told me that this would be important to you,” she said. Ben felt a strange surge of gratitude for his mother’s efforts, for Rey’s own discretion. She probably knew about the plans too, but she had chosen not to probe for the answers.

Ben nodded, sucked in a long, shaky breath, and then sagged, leaned back and away from his footlocker. “Hux sent me a letter via his lawyer,” he said. Tears started to choke him and he waited then until he could speak again. “He proposed marriage. To me.”

Rey did not answer, not right away, but he felt her radiant presence in the Force, her calmness, silent reassurance to the ragged fear he felt battering blindly at the inside of his ribcage. “You said yes,” she said. It was not a question.

“I love him,” Ben said, wretchedly. Each word threatened to stick in his throat and choke him. “I never told him, but I did. Come to think of it, he never told me, either.” 

Rey took his left hand in both of her own, her fingers warm around his. “It doesn’t need telling, because you both know it.” That was a polite way to phrase it, at best. Hux and Ben had never been able to express themselves adequately with words, hiding their feelings instead behind veiled insults, threats, desperate bouts of almost-brutal fucking. They had both sought something in each other; grown addicted to the search, and then never bothered to ask what they had been looking for in the first place, not until it was too late. 

“Has Uncle Luke said anything?” Ben asked bleakly, unsure of what to expect.

“Dad? No, and it’s none of his bloody business. You’re consenting adults,” Rey said, her smile suddenly bright, impish, less the poised, collected Jedi and more the excited young cousin for once. 

“So you’re okay with this?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” Rey nodded, “I’ll even officiate. I have to be there as your escort, anyway.”

“Nobody told me Jedi could officiate weddings,” Ben said, just a little dubious at her enthusiasm.

“Holy men and women can officiate weddings on Naboo, Ben. As a Jedi Knight I technically count as a holy woman under Naboo law.”

Ben nodded in response. He drew his hand away from hers and reached back into his footlocker, fingers brushing against something cold and hard within. He felt at the item for a moment, felt smooth lines of metal under his fingertips, and then drew it out to land with a soft, heavy thud on the carpeted floor. His old lightsaber sat in the fading sunlight, dull, damaged metal gleaming faintly as he picked it up. The unstable kyber crystal in it had shattered during his first duel with Rey, and he had held on to the useless hilt even now for reasons that he still struggled to articulate. He knew that he had kept it at first because it helped him focus his rage, but now? Perhaps he kept it because it had kept him alive for all these years. Perhaps because it stood as a constant reminder of his fall to the Dark. Perhaps because like him, it was broken now and no longer an instrument of war, one that now sat at the bottom of a footlocker to be forgotten in obscurity.

“What are you going to do with that?” Rey stood up, glanced at the damaged lightsaber curiously as Ben started to disassemble it. It gave him a strange, giddy joy to be taking it apart now, and the power field conductors chimed softly against each other as he pulled them away from the diatium power core. 

Ben reached down and took a pair of the conductors in his hand, pulled their bright alloy cores free from the cladding with a frown of concentration and an effort of the Force. “I’m going to need rings,” he said. The thought of part of this useless weapon turning into a symbol of love and trust left him strangely exhilarated with a hope that he had not allowed himself to feel for a very long time. The emotion left him feeling shivery, excited, and it took him an effort of will to steady his hands and not drop the small strips of alloy onto the carpet, where they would bury themselves in its deep pile and take a Force-augmented search to find again. 

Rey smiled then, nodded. “Yes. Yes, you do,” she said. 

Ben closed his eyes then, thought hard at the malleable little strips of alloy in the palm of his hand, and then with a tiny shudder they formed themselves into a pair of annulets, their surfaces rippled faintly from the compressive stress exerted by the Force. The rings glinted bright in the afternoon sunlight, a pair of tiny eclipses in the palm of his hand.

\---

Hux lay in his bunk, a book-slate resting on his chest as he stared blankly up at the industrial gray ceiling, plasteel wobbling ever so slightly with each inhalation and exhalation. Sabacc solitaire had started to bore him, and he had thought to browse through a translation of Omar Berenko’s poetry, but that too had failed to keep his attention.

Hux didn’t like to admit it to himself, but his spirits were at a low ebb, and he was finding it hard to stay defiant now that the second week of his trial had passed. He was tired, beaten, and at this point he just wanted to die, but that option was not one afforded him at this point. His cell was monitored constantly, and he had no doubt that any attempts at suicide would be flagged, interrupted by guards, and probably publicized heavily in the circus of humiliation that was the New Republic’s vaunted free press. It wasn’t even as though he held any illusions of himself as a kind, gentle person. Hux knew that he was a hard, driving man, cold, ambitious and cruel. But the things the New Republic had presented as evidence. How the Stormtrooper training program had been described as an orchestrated campaign of dehumanization. Hux, and his father before him, had sought to perfect that program because they had both recoiled at the old Imperial doctrine of using infantry as cannon fodder. How could he adequately explain that to someone who refused to understand that the lives of his troopers had been precious to him? 

Even his decision to pre-emptively destroy the Hosnian system had been born partially out of a desire to not squander the lives of his men in petty suppressive actions against a guerilla Resistance that could not be pinned down in a one-front war. The Battle of Hoth had illustrated perfectly the problems in trying to fight an insurgency like a standard planetary conflict, and the First Order would have ended the Resistance fairly bloodlessly had the sabotage at Starkiller Base not occurred.

If his training program for the Stormtrooper cohorts had been dehumanizing, then how would the New Republic describe his education, his childhood, the pressures and very real punishments of his academy days? If he accepted the prosecution’s allegations about the training program, then what did that mean for him? The thought unsettled him, actually almost physically hurt to contemplate. 

So instead he lay in his bed and thought, sought solace in his memories. Resistance-to-interrogation training had taught him to find that space in his head where nobody could touch him, a safe place, and it amused him still to tend that place, wander through it once in a while to ensure that it was still accessible and usable. 

He had been going through a series of wargames in his head – purely theoretical exercises based on battles from the Old Republic era, when he heard the soft click of heels against the floor outside his cell. The clicks were not hard and loud like those made by military issue boots, which meant only one thing. Riel Henb had returned from the errand that had taken her out to Naboo’s Lake Country. He sat up in his bunk and swung his legs over the edge, dropped his slate beside him. 

“How did it go?” he asked her without preamble, feeling a fresh, new kind of fear blooming within him, something sharp and acute and sweet in its hurt. _This is what it feels like to have something to lose,_ he thought, thought also of Ren’s sharp teeth and how they could tease and hurt in turns and banished that memory before it started to hurt too much.

Henb smiled, her expression warm but bittersweet. “Ben Solo says yes,” she said. 

Hux felt it then, the hot sting of tears, and he shut his eyes against them, took a deep breath to steady himself in this giddy rush of relief, and then opened his eyes again. The tears remained, distorting his vision slightly. “Will the tribunal approve my request for the wedding ceremony?” he asked her.

“There’s no precedent for refusal, no,” Henb said. “I think they will.”

“Then I can spend whatever remains of my life rather less disgruntled than I am now,” he said, and she only gazed up at him with gentle, long-suffering humor, shook her head.

“Don’t joke about that around me,” she said. “You know the tribunal is going to push for the death penalty in your case because you didn’t plead guilty. There’s still a chance that they’ll let you live if you change your plea.” 

“Considering that New Republic legislature passed the bill to bring the death penalty back two days after my capture, I think not,” Hux told her. 

“Hux. Brendol. Please. I’m supposed to defend you,” Henb looked so young then, so disappointed in him, and he forgave her the use of his first name, his father’s name. “Let me do my job.” 

“You have,” he told her. “It’s not your fault.” Hux knew that the fault was his. He blamed himself for his defeat, for the lapses that had led to his loss and the defeat of the First Order. He had accepted the blame as a matter of responsibility, because it was what a good officer did, and he did not shrink from his duty, not even now, exhausted and beaten as he was, because his father had not reared him to give up in the face of adversity. And then a strange thing happened as old memories aligned themselves in his head, a slow, ponderous sensation of movement like great, rusted wheels turning after decades of disuse. 

He was the officer that the academy had trained him to be, the son his father had brought him up to be, the reliable right hand of the Supreme Leader because he had believed unquestioningly that it had been his duty to be that person. And his father had been the man he was because he too, had believed with unquestioning faith and honor that it was what he had been meant to be. His grandmother had served the Republic in its dying days, doing her duty because it was what she had believed in. At no point in that chain had any one of them chosen to question their duty. At no point had he allowed it to ever cross his mind that what he had been doing could have been wrong. He had instead chosen to view dissent as sedition and concern as weakness.

Hux was where he was right now because he had chosen it as surely as he had chosen anything else in his life, and the weight of that knowledge cracked his bitter heart, left him stunned and gasping like a clubbed fish. What if the traitor FN-2187 had the right of it? Hux took a step forward, leaned heavily against the transparisteel barrier as the weight of his epiphany staggered him, and then sat down wearily on the floor of his cell. 

“Hux? Are you all right?” Henb asked him, concern painted in her glance, in the way she crouched to speak to him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been all right,” he said. The words felt oddly light in his chest, papery, almost insubstantial. “Riel,” he told her, using her forename for the first time, “You’re right. There’s a chance they’ll let me live. You’re fired.”

She pursed her lips and glanced at him, her expression back to her usual familiar exasperation. “You can’t fire your appointed defense attorney. That’s not how the law works. Besides, you need a second witness for your wedding and droids don’t count, no matter what the precedent of Padmé Naberrie’s secret wedding implies.”

“Very well,” Hux told her after a brief and tired laugh. “Just between the both of us, I _am_ guilty. But if I am, then I also deserve to die.” 

Henb’s eyes filled with tears, and her earnestness wrung at Hux’s heart. “Nobody deserves to die,” she said.

“If I don’t deserve to die, then neither did the inhabitants of the Hosnian system,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper, and this time Riel Henb truly had no reply for him.

\---

That night Ben lay awake in his bed, holding the pair of rings in a desperate grip, his fingers sweaty around the silvery metal. He pushed outwards again, hard, dislodging his consciousness from his body, from Varykino, soaring up on lake-borne thermals to search for Theed. He alighted again beside the courthouse in the Plaza of Justice, pushed through the cold walls of the prison to search for Hux.

Hux sat at a tiny desk tonight, his hands shuffling a homemade deck of cards. The doodled drawings on the card faces fascinated Ben at first. The tiny caricatures were detailed, drawn freehand in ink, and Ben let his senses linger over them briefly, studying each trump and suit. Hux had never displayed any kind of drawing ability in their time together and this little detail made Ben wonder more about the things they didn’t know about each other, things they had missed because they had left so much unspoken. Ben pushed closer to him, planted a brief invisible kiss on the nape of his neck where his hair was clipped short and neat, felt Hux go still, a tiny frisson running down his spine. 

_It’s me. I’m back,_ Ben thought. _I accept. I’ll marry you. I’ll be with you shortly._

“Showoff,” Hux whispered softly, almost inaudibly, as he laid his hand-drawn cards on the tabletop. Ben tried to kiss him on the mouth, missed and caught his chin instead, closed invisible fingers on his shoulder. “I’ll be waiting for you,” Hux whispered again as he continued with his game of solitaire. “Don’t keep me waiting too long. I love you.” He turned another card up, The Idiot, and Ben blinked mentally to find a portrait of himself drawn on the face of the card, every detail perfect. It would have been infuriating if it had not also been so sweet. 

_I won’t._

And then Ben fell back towards his body, towards the prison of nerve and bone that held him, and he stared upwards, unseeing into the space above his bed. Tears streamed from his eyes, ran down his temples as his heart fluttered wildly in his chest, beat against his sternum. The palm of his hand hurt from where the rings had dug into his flesh, but he continued to hold them, clasp them to his chest in the quiet and the dark.

\---

Ben woke up to a rapid tapping on his room door, and it opened before he had finished sitting up in his bed. It had been sixteen days since his mother’s last visit; the prison authorities were still hesitating on the matter of the wedding, last he had heard. He blinked as the lights brightened, but did not need to see who it was, could feel Rey and her presence in the Force as she summoned the lights.

“Is something wrong?” he asked her, a welter of thoughts falling across his mind – Hux dead, permission for the wedding declined, something else terrible? 

Rey shushed him, and then he blinked and realized that she was dressed formally in her Jedi robes, her lightsaber slung on her hip. “Leia’s here. So is Hux’s lawyer. They’re here to get you. Dad’s waiting for you, too.”

“Oh,” Ben said dumbly. He stood up, rubbed sleep from his eyes. He wanted to strip and put on some real clothes, but also realized that his cousin was still standing there in front of him.

“Hurry up and get dressed,” Rey said as she picked out a jacket, a shirt from the locker at the foot of his bed, thrust the articles of clothing into his hands. “Don’t forget the rings.” 

“I won’t.” Ben lifted the woven-wire cord he had been wearing around his neck, and the two handmade alloy rings chimed softly against each other like pendants. 

Rey smiled to see them shining against the thin fabric of his tunic, nodded. “Oh, and brush your hair,” she told him as she left the room. The door shut behind her with a soft click. “And wear the nice boots this time,” she called, her voice muffled through the wood. 

“Yes, mom,” Ben called back out to her as he started to dress, missing fasteners in his hurry. 

Ben found everyone waiting outside the lodge. His mother had arrived not in a speeder gondola or boat, but instead in a large airspeeder, one of the official Resistance ones. 

“Mom. Ms. Henb. Uncle Luke,” Ben started to say. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more notice,” Henb said. She looked drawn and tired, and had eschewed her tinted goggles at this late hour. He could see the dark bags under her eyes and on the creases of her jowls, and he could taste her exhaustion, the staleness of it surrounding her. 

“Have you… rested at all, Riel?” he asked her.

“No time,” she said sadly as they started to walk to the speeder’s open door. “The tribunal announced the verdict today. They found him guilty and pronounced sentence immediately after. Hux is going to be executed tomorrow, and he passes from civil custody to military jurisdiction six hours from now. We need to get you two married before that happens.” 

Luke and Leia flanked Ben as he stood dry-mouthed, his world falling away from him. They herded him gently onwards when his legs refused to move, and Rey took up the rear. 

“Isn’t this kind of thing supposed to take longer? Aren’t there appeals?” Ben nearly tripped on the speeder ramp, but Uncle Luke held him upright and nudged him onward, sat him down firmly on one of the seats, and his mother sat down beside him. 

“Theoretically,” Henb said with a tired shrug as she took the seat opposite Ben. “There’s supposed to be a normal appeal period of 60 to 90 days in New Republic law, but Hux is being tried under a special military tribunal which supersedes those laws for security reasons.” 

“It sets a dangerous precedent,” Leia sniffed as she rubbed at his back, trying to soothe him, and Ben realized that he was probably radiating his fear and despair enough that she felt it too. “I was against this from the start.” 

“I know you are, Mom.” Ben reached instinctively up for the cord around his neck, grasped the rings in his right hand. They reassured him, just by being there, and he took several deep breaths, tried to slow his own racing heartbeat. Leia took his hand in hers, squeezed his fingers gently, and it was as though he were ten again, frightened, going away. 

“I’ve filed an appeal, but I suspect it’s going to be rejected. Meanwhile your mother has kindly persuaded – “ Henb started to say. 

“Emotionally blackmailed,” Luke interjected.

“ _Persuaded_ the civil authorities in charge of Hux’s detention to allow this wedding to proceed,” Henb continued.

Rey shut the speeder door behind her and headed for the cockpit. “Ben, you forgot to brush your hair,” she said in passing.

Engines whined, and the locks on the doors clicked, a hard metallic sound, and then Ben’s tummy lurched as the airspeeder left the ground under Rey’s expert hand. 

“I don’t believe it – Ben,” his mother said, running her fingers through his tangled, unruly hair. “My son is not going to his wedding looking like a Wookiee who got caught in a turbine shaft. Does anyone have a comb or a hairbrush?” 

Luke pulled the cowl of his brown robe over his own personal disaster zone of a coif, shrugged as though to say _I haven’t seen a comb in seventeen years, what are you looking at me like that for?_

Henb reached into her purse, rummaged a little and then pulled out a hairbrush, its bristles tangled with long, light-brown strands of hair, and handed it over to Leia. As far as Ben had ever seen, she had kept her hair in a tidy, no-nonsense braid that looked like it had been glued in place, which probably meant that she braided and retied it at least four or five times a day. 

“Thank you,” Leia said, and she went to work on Ben’s scalp, taming his hair in sections. “Just because you’re an ascetic doesn’t mean standards of grooming don’t apply,” she grumbled softly under her breath as she worked. 

Ben wasn’t sure if she meant that for him, for Luke, or for all Jedi in general. And then it didn’t matter, didn’t matter what she meant because the tears were running down his face, dripping off his chin, as the enormity of events started to hit him.

\---

Hux wasn’t sure what he would find as his guards ushered him politely from his cell. A last-minute change of plans? The military tribunal’s executioners taking custody of him earlier than expected?

But they had not headed towards the building’s private rear exit, not bustled him towards another set of guards. Instead, they had led him to one of the disused offices, and opened the door to let him in. He stepped through the door, his wrists still shackled together, and then stopped short when he saw everyone present. A friend, three enemies (soon to be his family), his lover, star-crossed, long-lost, returning in impossible life to his side. 

“Ky- no, _Ben,_ ” Hux said, the words coming out in a rush. “I’m sorry. Which name should I use?” 

And then it didn’t matter as Kylo or Ben or whoever he was hugged him, as he leaned into that desperate embrace. It was as though every cell in his body cried out for its counterpart, its reflection and they hung together, separated by skin and bone and there was that soft, wonderful voice in his ear. “Hux - I don’t care. Call me whatever you want. I’m here.” 

“Darling,” Hux whispered, and then wonder of wonders, finally, at last he wept in an end to this terrible drought, this bittersweet ache he had not known he had been holding within for all these years.

\---

The armed guards hovered nervously, waited until Ben let go of Hux before they unfastened his shackles, and then they stepped back to guard the doors into the office. Ben watched Hux, drank in every detail of him, the way the pale light made his rufous hair look darker, almost auburn, the dark circles under his eyes, drying tears down his face. And then the other details, how he looked thinner but no less strong, the missing tooth in his fragile smile, the loneliness and desperation in his touch and kiss. Ben had never seen Hux so uncertain before, and this close he could almost taste the pain and sorrow behind that stiff upper lip, the doubt and guilt that so clouded the hate and bitterness in him. It seemed as though he were lit from within with a kind of cold electric charge that made Ben think of snow, of a pale winter sun in a leaden gray sky.

“I’m here,” Ben said again, holding Hux gently at arm’s length, not wanting to look away from his lover, from the changes wrought in him. “I told you I wouldn’t keep you waiting too long.” 

They were staring at him, at Hux. His mother, her eyes bright with tears of joy and pain, Riel Henb weary and resigned. Rey with her incredible calm and composure, Uncle Luke with a soft, gentle nod of blessing and approval. 

“We’re going to do this,” Hux said, his gap-toothed grin wide, beautiful, just a little insane. “Let’s get married.” 

_Before it’s too late,_ Ben read in his thought, in the desperate intensity of his gaze, and he nodded, lowered his head to pull the cord-necklace from around his neck, and handed it to his Uncle Luke, who had volunteered to be ringbearer. Rey pulled two small cards from a pocket of her robes and passed them to Hux and Ben. Each card was printed with the vows she had helped Ben write when she had volunteered to officiate.

Riel Henb took the paperwork out of her attaché case and spread the forms out on the table. She would be the wedding’s first witness, and Leia would be the second, and all they had left was the simple ceremony. 

Rey stepped up to them, and then said clearly, in her best public speaking voice, “Do you, Ben Solo, take this man, Brendol Hux, to be your lawfully wedded spouse?”

Ben’s voice wobbled slightly with nerves, anxiety, bittersweet joy and pain. “I, Ben Solo, do take you, Brendol Hux, to be my husband and partner. With all my love do I place this ring upon your finger. With this ring do I promise to be loving and faithful, in sickness and in health, for better or worse, in darkness and in light, as long as I shall yet live.” He took one of the rings from Luke’s outstretched left hand, slipped it carefully onto Hux’s ring finger. 

Rey continued. “And do you, Brendol Hux, take this man, Ben Solo, to be your lawfully wedded spouse?” 

Hux hesitated slightly as he read off the card, tears running slowly down his face. “I, Brendol Hux, do take you, Ben Solo, to be my husband and partner. With all my love do I place this ring upon your finger. With this ring do I promise to be loving and faithful, in sickness or in health, for better or worse, in darkness and in -" and then his voice cracked there, "light, as long as I shall yet live.” He accepted the ring from Luke, and Ben stood still as the ring was placed onto his finger. 

“Then,” Rey said, a single tear leaking out the corner of her eye to land on her robes, “by the power of the Force that binds us, surrounds us and brings us together, I declare you both married. What love and the Force unites, let no one tear asunder. Congratulations.”

They embraced again, shaking from high emotion, leaning wearily against each other as the others applauded briefly, their clapping echoing sparsely against the room’s walls. 

“I’m sorry,” Hux whispered against Ben’s neck, his breath warm, ticklish, sweetly familiar, “I’m sorry that this is all I can give you. That this time is all that we can have.”

“I won’t be sorry,” Ben murmured in reply, “because our time is more than now. We have the past as well as the present, and those memories are something that nobody can take away from me.”

“I thought I could lose my pain in you,” Hux said, pulling away briefly to look up at Ben, “but I found eternity instead. I won’t regret this if you don’t.” 

“I never will. Not you,” Ben said, and then he looked down at his mother, who had come up to stand nearby. 

“Ben? You’re forgetting something,” she said gently. “You’re supposed to kiss the groom.” 

Hux blinked, the tips of his ears turning a delicate red – he always flushed so prettily, Ben thought, and then they leaned into each other for a long, careful kiss. This was different from before – different from the sharp teeth and desperate gasps, fingernails leaving scratches in the skin of his back. This was something slower, gentler, more tentative; and Ben marked the heat of Hux’s mouth and the beats of his heart, wished that time would stop and freeze and leave them like this forever in this one perfect moment. 

Leia took Hux into a tight hug of her own as they pulled away from each other after the kiss. “Welcome to the family,” she told him, her eyes still bright with tears, and Ben’s heart twisted with more sweet agony. 

_I refuse to mourn what will never be,_ he thought as he watched his mother weep into his husband’s shoulder. _We have what we have, and it will be enough._

\---

Later.

Hux lay alone, strapped to a secure gurney in the execution chamber. He stared at his colorless reflection in the mirrored transparisteel window, guessed at the witnesses gathered on the other side. The tribunal had declared a media blackout just before declaring the verdict and sentence, and he was fairly sure that General Organa, influential though she was, was likely not privy to the information about where he had been taken, or even the location of the execution itself. That, he felt, was a good thing. He wasn’t sure how he would have felt if his next-of-kin and loved ones had to watch helplessly as he died. 

The change from civilian to military custody had happened in a smooth handover, his new guards leading him to a speeder shortly after they had checked his shackles. They had blindfolded him for the duration of his journey, and he had smelt salt, ionic sharpness and felt a biting chill in the wind when they disembarked. He guessed that they had brought him to one of the old Imperial facilities on Naboo’s southern sea, but he could not be sure. They had not removed his blindfold until he had been restrained on the gurney, and he had not seen anything of his surroundings except this room, the last place he would ever see. 

There was a soft hum on his left side, but he did not turn his head to look. Instead he touched his thumb to the new wedding ring on his finger, rotated it idly as he reminded himself to breathe slowly and calmly. He would not reward his executioners with a show of fear. 

“Excuse me,” a low fluting voice piped, to his left, and he turned his head then to glance at the modified medical droid that had just entered the room on soft treads. Behind it the secure door clanked shut and hissed, forming an airtight seal. “I am here to inform you of the procedure for your execution, as required by law.”

Hux swallowed, heard his throat click drily from the low humidity in the air. “Go on,” he said hoarsely. 

“At 1200 hours I will administer a sterile intravenous solution through a cannula in the medial cubital vein of your left arm. I will also begin monitoring of your vital signs. Once I have been given the order for your execution at 1210 I will begin the administration of a powerful sedative through the intravenous line. The sedative should render you unconscious within minutes. Once I confirm your loss of consciousness through telemetry and monitoring of your vital signs, I will notify the executioner, who will then flood this room with a chemical gas formulated to be lethal to your species. As I am a droid, I am immune to almost all forms of gas poisoning, and will therefore remain to monitor your vital signs until I ascertain that death has occurred and that your sentence has been carried out correctly. Do you understand?” 

“Yes. I do,” he told it, before he turned away to look back up at the room’s dull ceiling. 

“Excellent.” The droid sprayed his arm with a sterile antiseptic, the smell sharp and phenolic, hanging astringent in the air. 

“Would you mind telling me the time?” he asked the droid. 

“It is now 1154,” it said. “It is customary to record a final statement if you so wish.”

“No. No, thank you.” Hux closed his eyes and reached inward, reached past the fear and panic he had been fighting to go to that safe place behind his eyes. He brushed aside all thoughts of his impending death, chose only to think of Ben and the brief time they had shared together after their wedding. 

“I don’t want to die,” Hux had told Ben as they stood together for the last time, his wedding ring still new and foreign against his hand. “I haven’t told anyone,” he whispered, feeling oddly and deeply ashamed, “but I’m scared.” 

He watched as Ben swallowed, the muscles of his throat working as he fought more tears. “It’s normal to be scared,” Ben whispered in reply. “Is there anything you want me to do for you?”

“I don’t think they’ll let you come,” Hux said slowly, wretchedly as he started to weep again. “And even if they did I’d ask you to stay away. I don’t want you to see me like that.” 

Ben reached up then, brushed the tears gently from Hux’s cheek, and he had luxuriated in the brief touch, in that tiny intimacy. “I don’t – I don’t have to see you, or be there, to be with you,” Ben said softly, his voice almost a whisper. 

_Hux felt a faint sting, then, happening briefly to his body lying on the gurney in the execution room, turned away from his physicality to bury himself further in memory._

Hux thought of Ben’s tender whispers and the phantom kisses, of invisible fingers closing around his hand in those long, lonely nights. “Like those times you were beside me in my cell?” Those touches had been a tiny comfort, a promise that he was not alone in a universe that hated him and wanted him dead. 

“Like that, yeah,” Ben nodded, “I will hold your hand. I’ll stay with you to the end.”

“Really? To the end?” And then his guards were coming up to him, clearing their throats politely, and he stepped away from Ben for the last time, let them reshackle his wrists. 

“To the bitter end,” Ben promised, and Hux turned to look at him one last time, burn that extraordinary face into his mind, as his guards walked him out of the office and returned him to his cell to await the transfer to military custody. 

_It must almost be time,_ Hux thought, counting, marking time with his heartbeat, when he heard a ghost-whisper in his ear. 

_I’m here,_ Ben whispered, his voice soft, deep, gentle. _Can you hear me?_ Hux felt it then, a touch on his right hand, stronger and more palpable than it had ever been before. 

“It’s almost like you’re really here,” Hux subvocalized, just the barest movements of his tongue against his teeth and palate. 

“Excuse me?” The droid said, but he ignored it. 

Ben’s rich voice came back to his ear. _You’re closer to me than you were before in Theed. I can feel it._

“I’m scared,” Hux murmured almost inaudibly as he felt hot tears roll down his temples, soak into his hair, and his fingers closed tight around the sensation of Ben’s hand. “Don’t leave me.”

 _It’s okay. You won’t have to face this alone,_ came the reassuring whisper. _I’ll never leave you again,_ and then there was the briefest hint of a kiss on his brow, on his cheek, on the nape of his neck as his fingers and toes started to go numb. A cold, dark weariness seeped through him, spread up the branches of his nerves, and he heard it, heard Ben singing a soft lullaby he did not know as he fell gently, sweetly asleep.

\---

Riel Henb came to see Ben Solo one last time, a short week after the wedding. He chose to meet her at one of Varykino’s shaded balconies – one that, according to local lore, Anakin Skywalker had favored for his meditations when he had still been a Padawan. Ben liked it for its greenery, and it had been a good place to meditate his way through the grief and loss that threatened to overwhelm him still.

“Ben,” she said in greeting as he stepped out of the lodge, onto the balcony and into the sunlight slanting between vine-covered pillars. “Are you well?” She wore a formal jacket and trousers, her usual goggles, but she had also put on a short mourning cape in a dusty blue-gray, and the little gesture had touched him deeply. 

Ben bit his lip, tried not to cry, but failed. “Yes,” he told her, even as the tears started to drip down his face.

“He wanted you to have everything,” Henb said. She opened her nerf-leather attaché case and pulled out a small clear synthetic sleeve labeled with “Personal Effects”, handed it to Ben. 

The only things in it were Hux’s hand-drawn sabacc deck, the note card that Rey had given him on the day of the wedding, a set of military dog tags, and the wedding ring itself. Someone had thoughtfully secured the deck with a piece of string so that the cards would stay together. It seemed like something Henb would have done. 

Ben reached into the bag, took out Hux’s wedding ring and slipped it onto his finger, over his own wedding band. 

“Thank you,” he said. The silvery alloy caught the golden sunlight, and both rings blazed briefly as though touched with fire. It was comforting, somehow, to have something that Hux had been wearing when he had died, a comfort that twisted at his fresh grief and soothed it at once. _How very much like Hux,_ Ben thought, reminded again at their old cycle of insults, jibes, raw, bleeding love. 

“I’m sorry,” Henb said, and then she was taking off her goggles and wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, and Ben reached out and steadied her by the shoulder, squeezed gently to reassure.

“I’m not sorry,” he told her despite the pain that he still felt so keenly. “And neither was he.”

\---

Brendol Hux (1 ABY – 39 ABY) was a general in the First Order. He headed the development and implementation of the Starkiller Weapon (see Hosnian Prime Atrocity) and was also responsible for the Stormtrooper training and conditioning program. He was tried by the Galactic Military Tribunal in the Theed Trials of 39 ABY and 40 ABY, and convicted of war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against sapients and sentenced to death by gas chamber. 

Contrary to popular rumor, there was no secret burial following his execution. Documents retained by the Royal House of Naboo show that his death certificate was signed by the Royal Coroner of Naboo in cooperation with the Galactic Military Tribunal. His body was cremated following a full autopsy and the ashes cast into space as was standard protocol established by the New Republic following the defeat of the First Order and the liberation of the Unknown Regions.

**Author's Note:**

> The articles 19 and 21 that Hux cites in his refusal to plead come straight out of the Charter of the International Military Tribune that ran the Nuremberg Trials. I have no sympathy for Nazis, but I don’t know if the end ever justifies the means. I don’t think my pay grade is high enough for me to answer these questions, either. 
> 
> Hux’s declaration that they should just take him out and shoot him was inspired by Nicolae Ceaucescu’s trial after the Romanian revolution.
> 
> The wedding vows were inspired by the lyrics of the Irish ballad _Grace_ , about a couple who are married seven hours before the groom is executed. 
> 
> I _told_ you that this was going to be sad.


End file.
